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David Perlmutter

The question that has always struck me as central, when I was a
student and ever since, is this:

(1) In what ways do languages differ and in what ways are all human
languages alike?

When I was a student it was common for answers to this question to be
proposed based on evidence from English alone. In my dissertation and
ever since I have tried to enlarge the language base in terms of
which this question is discussed. One chapter of my dissertation, in
fact, later evolved into a much-discussed parameter of variation.

What has happened to question (1) since my student days is nothing
short of amazing. There has been an explosion of research on the most
diverse languages, largely due to the development of theoretical
constructs capable of handling a far wider range of languages than
the constructs in use in my student days could handle. The advances
in understanding, I think, have been impressive, although the
splintering of the research community along theoretical lines, at
least in syntax, has to a considerable extent obscured the real gains
that have been made.

The question itself continues to be central to linguistics. It has
not been answered not because it is an ill-conceived question, but
because, I would say, it is right on the mark. The results of
research on typologically diverse languages have brought out greater
cross-linguistic differences than were even imagined in my student
days. To cite just one example, my own expansion of my research to
sign languages alongside spoken ones has made me keenly aware of the
possibility of far greater cross-linguistic variation than previously
imagined and has made finding cross-linguistic commonalities much
more challenging.

From my own perspective, I think I know far more about how languages
work than anyone knew in my student days, but at the same time, what
I think remains to be discovered amounts to much more than anyone
imagined in my student days. And that, I think, is real progress.